Month: March 2026

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Five days ago, on March 15th, marked the sixteenth yahrzeit of my mother. And today, March 20th, would have been her eighty-sixth birthday. She died just five days before turning seventy.

Today is also the first day of spring, the spring equinox.

There is something in that convergence that I cannot ignore.

Jewish time asks us to hold memory and renewal in the same breath. We do not wait until grief is finished to begin again. We do not wait until the heart is fully repaired to notice what is blooming. Instead, we stand in that in-between place, where loss and possibility meet.

Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) teaches, “לַכֹּל זְמָן וְעֵת לְכָל חֵפֶץ תַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם” — “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1).

And yet, life rarely parcels itself so neatly. The seasons overlap. The calendar folds in on itself. A yahrzeit can sit beside a birthday. Winter can turn toward spring even as we are still carrying what has been.

The equinox itself is a moment of balance. Equal light and equal darkness. Not the absence of night, but its partnership with day.

That is what this day feels like to me.

Sixteen years of missing my mother. At the same time, the quiet, insistent return of light. The memory of who she was. The question of who I am still becoming because she lived.

The psalmist cries out, “מִן־הַמֵּצַר קָרָאתִי יָּהּ עָנָנִי בַמֶּרְחָב יָהּ” — “From the narrow place I called out to God; God answered me with expansiveness” (Psalm 118:5).

Grief can be a narrow place. It can constrict, press in, make the world feel smaller than it once was. And yet, somehow, over time, something widens. Not because the loss disappears, but because love insists on taking up space. Because memory becomes not only what we carry, but what carries us.

Spring does not erase winter. It emerges from within it.

Perhaps that is what we mean when we speak about renewal, about rebirth. Not a return to what was, but the courage to become something new while still carrying what has been.

This morning in my pre-Shabbat Rabbi’s Corner message, I wrote about courage as an act of holiness. This evening, I am realizing that this may be one of the holiest forms of courage we are asked to practice: the courage to begin again without letting go of what we have loved.

To allow grief and growth to coexist.
To let memory root us, even as we reach toward what is still unfolding.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav taught, “כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד, וְהָעִקָּר לֹא לְפַחֵד כְּלָל” — “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not to be afraid at all.”

Perhaps not being afraid does not mean that we are untouched by loss. Perhaps it means that even on the narrow bridge, we keep walking. That we trust there is something on the other side of winter. That we allow ourselves to step into the unknown with tenderness, with memory, with love.

Tonight, I am aware that my mother does not get any older. She will forever remain five days shy of 70. However, I become older each and every second of the day.

Tonight, I am also carrying her with me in a different way.

I will wear her dress that was made for her when she was in her early 20’s – a dress that is almost as old as I.
I will be wrapped in her tallit, made for her by my sister-in-law, Marilyn.
I will be adorned with her jewelry, bequeathed to her by my grandfather, Bill.

I also look like my mother. I see her face every time I look in the mirror.

But more than that, I carry in my heart the love she lavished upon me. I try to live the values she taught me, not only in what I believe, but in the choices I make, in the ways I show up, and in the love I extend to others. And I carry her through the quiet, enduring gift of memory.

Not as costume. Not as memory alone. But as something that still lives. Something that still moves. Something that still accompanies me into this moment.

Maybe this is what rebirth can look like.

Not becoming someone entirely new, untethered from what has been. But allowing what we have loved to continue to live through us. In what we wear. In how we bless. In the ways we show up for one another. In our hearts, our minds, our memories, and our actions and deeds of love.

The past does not disappear. It becomes part of the fabric of who we are becoming.

So on this night of equinox, of balance, of beginnings that come intertwined with endings, perhaps the invitation is this:

To honor what has been.
To bless what is.
And to find the courage, again and again, to step into what is still becoming.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Courage As An Act of Holiness

Earlier this week, I found myself walking through a space not yet complete, and yet already filled with presence. In the historic Presidio in San Francisco, overlooking the quiet vastness of the bay, a new institution is taking shape: the Courage Museum (A project of Futures Without Violence). It is still being built, still finding its physical form, and yet its spirit is already unmistakably alive.

This is not a museum in the traditional sense. It is envisioned as a kind of laboratory for human transformation, a space that asks not only what has happened, but what might yet be possible. Its founders, including Esta Soler of Futures Without Violence, (and a member of URJ Congregation Emanuel in San Francisco) speak of it as an effort to spark a movement of young changemakers, to turn courage into action before violence ever takes root.

I was there with a group of rabbis as part of my Reform Rabbis’ conference (CCAR). We were invited not simply to observe, but to learn, be inspired, and to bear witness: to stories of gun violence, sexual violence, racial hatred, harm inflicted in the very places meant to be safest. Stories of antisemitism, isolation, pain carried quietly and for far too long. It could have been overwhelming, except that the telling itself was suffused with something else, something that felt like insistence: that these stories matter, that they must be heard, and that listening itself can begin to shift the world.

I was mesmerized.

We were joined by a panel of four Jewish teens from a local Hebrew Day School. They spoke about courage, about what it means to inherit a broken world and still believe in the possibility of repair. They were articulate in a way that felt almost startling, not because of rehearsal and practice, but because of clarity. They did not speak in abstractions. They spoke about responsibility. About empathy. About the quiet, difficult work of really hearing another person’s story. They spoke their truths.

As I listened, I found myself wondering whether courage, in their generation, may look different than it has in our own. Perhaps it is less about certainty, more about openness. Less about having the answers, more about the willingness to stay present to questions that do not resolve easily. There was something in their voices that suggested not naiveté, but a kind of moral imagination, a capacity to envision a world not yet built and to begin, even now, to work toward a future bright with the promise of hope.

Then, as if on cue, we turn this week to the opening word of the book of Leviticus: Vayikra, “And God called.”

“וַיִּקְרָא אֶל־מֹשֶׁה וַיְדַבֵּר ה’ אֵלָיו מֵאֹהֶל מוֹעֵד לֵאמֹר׃”
“And God called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying…” (Leviticus 1:1).

The Torah does not begin this book with action, but with a call. A reaching outward. A voice that invites response.

In our tradition, holiness is not something distant or abstract. It is something we create through attention, through relationship, through the ways we choose to show up in the world. To be called is not only to hear, but to answer. To be called is to recognize that the work of bringing sanctity into the world is not reserved for another time or another generation. It is for each and every one of us, here and now.

Standing in that unfinished museum, listening to those young voices, I felt that call in a new way. Not as something grand or distant, but as something immediate and human. The call to listen more deeply. The call to cultivate empathy, cultivate courage. The call to take seriously the possibility that transformation begins not with systems alone, but with the courage to encounter one another, fully and honestly.

Holiness, then, may begin here. Not only in ritual, though it lives there as well, but in the spaces where we allow ourselves to be changed by what we hear. In the quiet, demanding work of seeing another person’s humanity and refusing to turn away.

There is so much work that remains. And none of it can be done alone.

As we gather this Shabbat, perhaps the question is not only whether we hear the call of Vayikra, but how we choose to answer it. What it might mean, in this moment, to become people who do not wait for a finished world, but instead step, with courage, with empathy, and with open hearts and minds, into the work of building it together.

Shabbat Shalom!